My new project, Checkpanel, went into public beta recently. Checkpanel is a checklist application which focuses on repeating checks. Unlike traditional checklists, Checkpanel keeps track of all reported checks (marking something as working or not working). You can see who when last checked a test case and what the errors were. You can also let some checks be executed automatically and set reminders for when you would like to check something again. And much more.

I imagined it primarily for use in quality assurance of web apps, for example when you frequently want to check if a recent change broke the contact form or had similar side effects. Of course you can also use it for anything else which needs to be checked frequently. Checkpanel can be used for test case management, regression testing, manual testing, smoke testing and much more.

thesixtyone is a platform on which you can listen to and rate music and rate it. Musicians upload their music for everyone to listen to. If you like it, you can “bump” it, giving it a vote. The music which gets voted the most is posted to the front page. So basically, it works for music like the famous social news platform Digg works for news.

MeeTimer can help you there. This extension for Firefox logs in detail on which sites you spend how much time. You can then see in its stats how many work hours you have wasted and which sites are the worst time killers.

Critical Metrics walks a different path. It systematically spiders through music reviews in various media. The collected recommendations are then presented at the website. This way, you do not find music recommendations which are selected for you personally, but good music in general. Filtering the music to your personal taste remains your job.

You can listen to the music suggestions directly at the site (for free of course). All recommended songs are provided via a flash player in good quality and full length. You can’t download the songs, but there are links to various online shops where you can buy the music if you like it.

You can search the musical repertoire of Critical Metrics in different ways. Right at the top of each page is a menu where you can choose different sources for recommendations. You can also choose how up-to-dateness. Besides that, there are search functions and browsing by the providing source (like iTunes). There seems to be functionality for organizing play lists, but I didn’t test it.

Personally, I’m having difficulties finding the right music for me at Critical Metrics. This might be the fault of my weird musical taste. :) Nevertheless, I like the idea of this platform.

The Internet is the perfect tool for procrastination. It is way too easy to get lost in the endless flow of information. You can virtually surf the net forever and you will always find some interesting new thing. Abstaining from the net is hard, but many of us already have a handy tool installed which can help: Personal Firewalls.

The Internet opened many new beautiful ways of communication, many of them even in real time. Unfortunately, Internet connections have always had a latency that has been too high to allow musicians to play across the globe. The small delays which appear on every net connection are a massive problem for musical applications.

Now, another project takes the challenge to create a global rehearsal room. eJamming AUDiiO claims to have overcome the latency with smart algorithms.

I did not test this software myself, but I do not believe that they have really overcome the delays. I have yet to see an Internet connection which has a latency low enough to jam together. Online gamers probably know the difficulty of Internet latency. I guess this basic latency is still present even with eJamming AUDiiO, but they probably try to make it not matter anymore.

Digging around on their website shows that my guess is not completely unfounded:

You MUST hear your own music with the slight delay eJamming AUDiiO imposes on everybody’s music to keep you all in sync.

So basically, the software delays everything, even your own sound, to keep all players in sync. This is probably a little difficult to get used to, but seems like a promising approach.

Currently, eJamming AUDiiO is still in a beta phase and free of charge. It is expected to cost about 10-15 Euros per month when it finally launches, probably in July.

How Google & Co. rank their search results is generally considered a mystery. For search engines, this is one of their most precious secrets. A whole industry called search engine optimization (SEO) emerged around this secret. SEOs try to look behind the secret and optimize web sites to the factors which they think influence the rating.

Rumors around the factors and their influence are quite unclear. A good guide through all those factors is “Search Engine Ranking Factors v2” from SEOmoz. It includes the opinions of 37 SEOs which are compiled to a collective and weighted ranking factor hit list.

Music is great. Music is manifold. Everyone has his own taste of music. What is loved by one might be refused by the next.

These different preferences make it pretty difficult to find new great music. The spectrum is – fortunately – large, but finding the music that appeals to you personally turns out to be like the search for the needle in the haystack.

Several internet services have lined up to help easing your search – time to give you an overview of the most important services of their kind.

Besides all this fancy new technology, you should not forget those primitive methods to find great new music. You can still ask friends for recommendations, listen in your record store to an unknown CD because it has an interesting name or simply looks pretty. The success rates of these “analog” techniques are surprisingly high.